343
Philips Hue will force users to upload their data to Hue cloud - Home Assistant
(www.home-assistant.io)
Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io
I guess I could keep buying them and sticking them on my zigbee network, but I should probably get off the Hue train before things get worse. The issue is that they're just amazing bulbs and I can't find a competitor with similar light and color tuning. Are there any comparable options yet?
Nanoleaf bulbs are great and their Essentials line work offline without an account.
I wouldn't say they're great; they're adequate. There's a lot of issues with the bulb firmware that still needs ironing out both with stability and feature set.
What features are you missing?
Basic features like turning a bulb on with a set brightness or color (if you're lucky, you can turn on with a set brightness). No support for scenes (due to matter spec) which can lead to issues sending commands to light groups. And if you want to actually update bulbs good luck because it's buggy as hell.
I have a nice mix of Hue and IKEA bulbs in my house, running on zigbee2mqtt. The IKEA bulbs are solid and I've had no major issues, but I did notice their smaller E14 bulbs had an annoying faint buzz sound when they were off, so they got swapped out for hue bulbs.
But as long as you're running zigbee2mqtt or some other hub I would still consider hue bulbs as an option.